Pope Francis

Below are all the articles published in Sojourners magazine and sojo.net about Pope Francis, who became the head of the Roman Catholic Church on March 13, 2013.
Pope Francis gives thumbs up as he arrives for the weekly general audience at the Vatican on May 18, 2022. REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane
Mitchell Atencio 1-31-2024

Pope Francis meets with director Martin Scorsese at the Vatican, Jan. 31, 2024. Vatican Media/­Handout via REUTERS

Scorsese, talking about his upcoming film on the life of Jesus, told the Los Angeles Times: “I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion.”

Pope Francis leads the Angelus prayer at the Vatican, January 7, 2024. Vatican Media/­Handout via Reuters

Pope Francis, tackling conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine in his yearly address to diplomats, said on Monday that “indiscriminately striking” civilians is a war crime because it violates international humanitarian law.

A rainbow flag is seen on the wall of a Catholic church in Cologne, Germany as the building is open for same-sex couples to receive a blessing. REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen/File Photo

The Vatican on Thursday moved to calm Catholic bishops in some countries who have balked over last month's approval of blessings for same-sex couples, telling them that the measure is not “heretical” or “blasphemous.” In a five-page statement, the Vatican's doctrinal office also acknowledged that such blessings could be “imprudent” in some countries where people who receive them might become targets of violence, or risk prison or even death.

Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who signed the Dicastery of the Doctrine of Faith’s document regarding LGBTQ+ inclusion in marriage and baptism sacraments, poses as he meets with relatives and friends during a courtesy visit following his appointment by the Pope Francis, during a Consistory ceremony for the creation of 21 new cardinals on Sept. 30, 2023 at St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. Photo by Eric Vandeville/ABACAPRESS.COM via Reuters.

Transgender people can be godparents at Roman Catholic baptisms, witnesses at religious weddings, and receive baptism themselves, the Vatican’s doctrinal office said on Wednesday, responding to questions from a bishop.

Pope Francis speaks during the First General Congregation of the Synod at the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, Oct. 4, 2023. Vatican Media/­Handout via REUTERS

Pope Francis called for an end to attacks and violence in Israel and Gaza on Sunday, saying terrorism and war would not solve any problems, but only bring further suffering and death to innocent people.

The document, known as an apostolic exhortation, titled "Laudate Deum," written by Pope Francis, is displayed in a bookshop near the Vatican in Rome, Italy, October 4, 2023. REUTERS/Remo Casill

Pope Francis on Wednesday appealed to climate change deniers and foot-dragging politicians to have a change of heart, saying they cannot gloss over its human causes or deride scientific facts while the planet “may be nearing the breaking point.”

Peter Isely, survivor of sexual abuse, and founder of ECA (Ending Clergy Abuse) Tim Law attend a march with survivors of clergy sexual abuse and activists near the Vatican, in Rome, Sept. 27, 2023. REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane

A group of Catholic Church abuse victims and their advocates on Wednesday called on Pope Francis to enforce “zero tolerance” against clerical sex abuse, after completing a six-day pilgrimage to Rome carrying a large wooden cross.

Pope Francis accompanied by Portugal's President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (R) at the end of a meeting at Belem Palace in Lisbon, Portugal, Aug., 2, 2023. The Pontiff will be in Portugal on the occasion of World Youth Day (WYD), one of the main events of the Church that gathers the Pope with youngsters from around the world, that takes place until Aug. 6. ANDRE KOSTERS/Pool via REUTERS

Pope Francis promised on Wednesday to continue to “stir things up” in the church as he arrived in Portugal to preside at a mass gathering of young Catholics aimed at energizing a new generation of believers.

An old black-and-white photo of students and teachers sitting and standing on the steps of the Thomas Indian School building in the 1890s.

Photograph from the New York State Archives

WHEN POPE FRANCIS visited Canada in July 2022, he said he was “deeply sorry” for the abuses inflicted upon peoples from First Nations by more than a century of Catholic-run residential schools. Francis decried the ways “many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous peoples,” which resulted in “cultural destruction and forced assimilation.”

To his credit, the pontiff acknowledged that his apology was not “the end of the matter,” and that serious investigation of what was perpetrated and enabled by the church was necessary for the survivors of the schools “to experience healing from the traumas they suffered.”

In the United States, the Seneca Nation is paving a path toward that healing process in their homelands, in particular from harm caused by a Presbyterian-run residential school.

A month after the pope’s apology, Matthew Pagels, then-president of the Seneca Nation — which historically inhabited territory throughout the Finger Lakes and Genesee Valley regions of New York — announced a new initiative to compile and catalog a list of residential school attendees.

To lead the effort, Pagels tapped Sharon Francis, a member of the Wolf Clan of the Seneca Nation and program coordinator at the Seneca Nation crime victims unit. Her passion, she said, is helping her communities heal from personal, intergenerational, and historical traumas.

The Editors 7-26-2023
An illustration of Vietnamese climate activist Hoang Thi Minh Hong. She has blue and purple-dyed hair. In the background, a small earth and grassy field at sunrise is to the left, a forest river and waterfall above her, and fish in the sea to the right.

Hoang Hong, a Vietnamese climate activist, was arrested June 1, 2023, the fifth high-profile climate activist in two years to be charged with tax evasion in Vietnam. She remains in jail as of this writing. / Illustration by Hoan Phan

FOR MATTHIAS ROBERTS, and many others, growing up in the church was a traumatic experience. His childhood churches, he writes in our cover feature, were “filled with people who weren’t afraid to tell me I needed to become straight for God to save me from hell.” The effect of such “adverse religious experiences,” as Roberts explains, goes far beyond the immediate harm done to individuals in these settings and can linger deep into their adult lives. That trauma can be triggered by any church experience, even in a supposedly safe and affirming context — another reminder that what happens in any branch of the body of Christ affects the integrity and witness of the whole of the church.

Journalist Gabriel Pietrorazio writes about another kind of church-related trauma, that stemming from what Pope Francis called the “cultural destruction and forced assimilation” of residential schools, often church-run, that many Indigenous people in the U.S. and Canada were made to attend. While there isn’t a clear or easy map to healing for the survivors of religious trauma, one necessary component is the presence of a loving, compassionate community — it’s not a journey to be undertaken alone.

Carmen Celestini 7-10-2023
An illustration of a large old book in Gothic print with four stars superimposed over the pages. Each displays photos with blue tinting of immigrant families climbing over or sitting on border fences, as well as parents carrying their children.

Illustration by Mark Harris

RELIGION PROMOTES WHAT is good in humanity —  mercy, wisdom, charity, justice, compassion. These are fundamental to most religious traditions. But religious institutions and movements consist of humans capable of both good and evil, truth and lies, peaceableness and violence. Most Americans have positive feelings about the role religion plays in American life, according to recent surveys. But more than 75 percent are against religious organizations endorsing political candidates or getting involved in partisan politics.

Religious zeal and political power can be an explosive combination — which is why the First Amendment promotes the separation of these powers. Yet the heart and faith of voters impact their choices in the polling booth — and the emotions and imaginations of voters can be swayed by media, social groups, and targeted manipulation to impact an individual’s vote.

One form of manipulation is through conspiracy theories — and conspiracy theories that manipulate religious and social imaginations are particularly potent. They are not new — recall the early U.S. grassroots movements, such as the Anti-Masonic Party and the Know-Nothings, who fought against perceived threats to Protestant Christian values, as well as the John Birch Society’s modern links to the Christian Identity Organization.

As conspiracy theories, disinformation, and populism become more mainstream, one less-understood conspiracy is having an outsized impact on immigration laws: The “great replacement theory” promotes the idea that nonwhite people are brought into the United States and other Western countries to “replace” white voters as part of a godless, liberal political agenda.

The 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, reminded many Americans that the horrors of organized hate were not something in the past. The refrain by white nationalists of “You will not replace us!” recalled virulent antisemitism and anti-immigrant rhetoric of earlier eras. The media repeated the slogan as it tried to make sense of how domestic terrorism, spurred on by online rhetoric regarding the removal of Civil War statues, could have culminated in such social violence and the murder of Heather Heyer by neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. It was a traumatic moment among many in America.

Pope Francis leaves at the end of the weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, May 3, 2023. REUTERS/Remo Casilli

Sexual abusers are disgusting “enemies” who deserve to be condemned and punished — but also deserve Christian love and pastoral care because they too are children of God, Pope Francis said.

An Indigenous woman in traditional clothes in front of the Sainte-Anne Basilica. She unfurled, a few minutes earlier in the church, a banner calling for the rejection of the doctrine of discovery, during Pope Francis’ trip to Canada to apologize to Indigenous people for abuses in residential schools for children. Quebec, Canada, July 27th, 2022. David Himbert / Hans Lucas via Reuters

The Vatican on Thursday formally repudiated the colonial-era “doctrine of discovery,” used centuries ago to justify European conquests of Africa and the Americas, saying “it is not part of Catholic Church teaching.”

Pope Francis speaks during a general audience at St Peter’s Square, Vatican City, March, 29, 2023. Vatican Media/Handout via REUTERS

Pope Francis has a respiratory infection and will need to spend “a few days” in hospital for treatment, the Vatican said in a statement on Wednesday

Pope Francis attends the Ash Wednesday mass at the Santa Sabina Basilica in Rome on February 22, 2023. REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane/File Photo

Pope Francis marks 10 years as head of the Roman Catholic Church on Monday celebrating Mass with cardinals in the chapel of the Vatican's Santa Marta hotel where he has lived since his election.

Jim Rice 2-16-2023
An illustration of Earth with red continents and pink seas. Jagged yellow and blue lines soar around and above the Earth, pointing in many directions.

Dusan Stankovic / iStock

IT SEEMS PATENTLY obvious: We live in a world of limited resources. Because of that, humans simply cannot continue to relentlessly produce and consume more and more stuff and expect the planet to survive. The path of unchecked growth is, without doubt, not sustainable. And yet, mainstream economists and headline writers still seem stuck in the mantra that “growth” (by which they mean increases in misleading measures such as gross domestic product) is an unmitigated good — the alternatives being dire situations such as “stagflation” and recession, and thus to be avoided at all costs.

Prophets among us have challenged that view, and have been ostracized by “respectable” experts as a result. Pope Francis, for instance, in his 2020 book Let Us Dream, wrote that “in the wealthier parts of the world, the fixation with constant economic growth has become destabilizing, producing vast inequalities and putting the natural world out of balance.” Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, in her usual plain-spoken way, famously challenged world leaders on the subject: “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

John C. Wester 12-26-2022
An illustration with a red backdrop of two hands wrapped around a nuclear missile that's been broken in half.

wenjin chen / iStock

IN NOVEMBER, a stray missile from the Russia-Ukraine war landed in Poland, killing two men in their 60s who worked at a grain warehouse. It took several emergency meetings with NATO officials to determine whether Russia had intentionally escalated the war into the region of the Western military alliance. All parties deemed it an “accident.” (The missile came from Ukraine.)

What if that stray missile had a nuclear warhead?

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine must be firmly condemned, as well as his cruel and illegal war with its continued escalation. But accidents happen. Even a limited or regional use of nuclear weapons could have planetary effects, blocking the sun enough to cause a global temperature drop, collapsing crop production, and resulting in massive starvation, according to a report by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

As the Poland example shows, today we are facing the most serious nuclear threats since the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago, which then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said we survived only by luck.

Nuclear weapons raise biblical issues. The continuing survival of God’s creation and the human race cannot rely on just “luck” but instead needs providential intervention. A few weeks before the November missile crisis in Poland, Pope Francis said, “Today, in fact, something we dreaded and hoped never to hear of again is threatened outright: the use of atomic weapons, which even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki continued wrongly to be produced and tested.”

Gabriel Pietrorazio 10-03-2022

Pope Francis receives a gift from Indigenous people during a meeting with Indigenous peoples and members of the Parish Community of Sacred Heart in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada July 25, 2022. REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane.

Pope Francis’ July visit to the First Nations in Canada has rekindled conversations about the Catholic Church’s responsibility in blessing and legitimizing the colonization of Indigenous homelands.

Jim Rice 9-01-2022
Raised hands lift up banners with cartoon-style clouds on a sky-blue background with a bright yellow sun in the center. Behin the banners, blue-gray cartoon clouds are shadowed on a dark gray background

Illustration by Adrián Astorgano

WHY THE RECENT surge in union activity? The nationwide shortage of workers is one factor, to be sure, as is the COVID pandemic. But another contagion might be even more important: Hope. “You see it most clearly with the Starbucks campaign where they won those initial two victories, and it was like a switch going off for people: ‘We can do this!’” labor attorney Alex van Schaick told Sojourners. “There was a contagion effect, in a positive sense. Hope is contagious — I think that’s really true.” Clayton Sinyai, executive director of the Catholic Labor Network, agreed that the confidence and resolve of workers is making a dramatic difference. “It seemed for a long time that employers had gotten so skilled at manipulating the union election process that a lot of people had become very discouraged about trying to form unions,” Sinyai said. “Now we’re seeing a generation of workers who are not taking no for an answer.”

Mitchell Atencio 8-30-2022

Catholic women with parasols expressing the call for women’s ordination in the church at the Vatican, Aug. 29, 2022. Courtesy Women’s Ordination Conference.

Kate McElwee, the executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference and one of the women at the protest, spoke with Sojourners’ Mitchell Atencio about her hope for women’s ordination, Francis’ attitude toward reforms, and the symbolic nature of their activism.